All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.
Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.
A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow.
I am entering into the truth, into nature.
Perhaps I have no talent, but all vanity aside - I do not believe that anyone makes an artistic attempt, no matter how small, without having a little - or there are many fools.
Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him.
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
Why did I hesitate to put all this glory of the sun on my canvas?
Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.
By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.
Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.
Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world
A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.
If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.
The single most powerful tool for winning a negotiation is the ability to get up and walk away from the table without a deal
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.
When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.
It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.
With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.
My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!
Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.
A meter of green is greener than a centimeter.
I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.
How do you see those tree?... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.
What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?
In art one is concerned with the condition of the spirit for three quarters of the time; one must therefore care for oneself if he wishes to make something great and lasting.
Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!
It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.
The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.
A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.
Oh mysterious world... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul - a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe.
Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth
Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.
There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?
If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!
Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.
Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.
The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.
Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.
A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.
Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised.
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!
In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.
I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.
Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.
Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.
Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second... You see the sequence.
Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.
Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?
A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.
Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
Civilization is what makes you sick.
But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.
Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer.
The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.
Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.
No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Having the certitude of a succession of days... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.
Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature.
A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.
My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.
Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them.
I have come to an unalterable decision - to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.
In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
Civilization is paralysis.
Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes.
And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.
Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.
Poor artist! You gave away part of your soul when you painted the picture which you are now trying to dispose of.
Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows.
Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.
I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.
The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child.
The work of a man is the explanation of the man.
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists
The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.
Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent...When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion?
Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.
Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
Art = a mad search for individualism.
There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.
It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.
I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.
It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
for Christ's sake, were the mountains blue, then chuck on some blue and don't go telling me that it was a blue a bit like this or like that, it was blue wasn't it? Good - make them blue and that's enough!
A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!
On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.
Oh yes! he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland - those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.
However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end.
Art is either revolution or plagiarism
Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!
The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain.
Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.
Proficiency in art is a contract with your self and the empowerment of your self. Not all of us demand or even desire proficiency, but for those who do it's necessary to temper the influence of groups. And while some artists think history is bunk, the historical evidence is overwhelming: "In my isolation I grow stronger."
Go on working, freely and furiously, you will make progress and sooner or later your worth will be recognised, if you have any.
Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.
There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme.
I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.
One's state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting.
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.
How to re-light the fire the very ashes of which are scattered?
Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?
